Project

The HIT Lab NZ is participating in the EURASIAPAC Project, funded through the European FP7 framework. Please consider contributing to our research effort by filling in our online questionnaire. We are interested in your experiences and expectations concerning European – Asian collaboration.

The HIT Lab NZ at the Canterbury University (Christchurch, New Zealand) in collaboration with the Institute of Information Processing (Warsaw) has the following vacancy for a PhD student:

Performance Indicators and Visualizations for Polish Science

Project Description

In many countries, quantifiable indicators are being used to assess the success of scientific organizations and individuals. The discussion and implementation of scientific indicators is only starting in Poland, which gives an opportunity to develop a modern system for the assessment of scientific organizations and individuals.

This system should go far beyond the counting of publications and should balance qualitative with quantitative indicators. Such a system should be easy to use and openly available, so that the wide public can make up its own mind about the quality of organizations, individuals and the topics that are being investigated. This approach will help to democratize and objectify discussions that may lead to the future funding policies.

The Institute of Information Processing (OPI) in Warsaw is officially keeping the record of the results of the completed research and R&D projects and will provide access to their databases. The goal of this PhD project is to develop a user-friendly software tool that allows researchers and policy makers to reliably assess the scientific performance of individuals, projects and organizations.

LEGO is sponsoring our ROILA project and today 20 Mindstorms NXT boxes and one cubic meter of LEGO Technic arrived (estimated value of 7000 EUR). I am not sure how I can keep our PhD students away from playing LEGO all day. :-)

Alan Turing proposed a test for the intelligence of machines in 1950. Despite great efforts, not computer has passed this test so far. Each year, chat bots compete for the Loebner Prize, the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. No contender was able to fool the jury yet. Major problems of the chat bots are the lack of common knowledge and the logical consistency of a dialogue.

We explore a new approach to chat bots by focusing on non-logical conversation topics: mysticism. The founding books of the major religions are widely acknowledged examples of mystical topics. We selected the New Testament, the Koran and Rigveda as the knowledge base for our conversational robots.

The robots are able to autonomously talk to each other and to humans about their religious believe. Each robot represents a belief, but we do not reveal their convictions. This ambiguity forces observers to follow the actual conversations instead of quickly applying stereotypes.

We hope that the peaceful conversation amongst the robots inspires an open dialogue amongst the religions. By focusing on a discussion of the original texts, we hope to emphasize our shared believes.

Welcome to the Participants Database at the Department of Industrial Design at the TU/e. It will help you to quickly find participants for your experiments by storing information about people that previously participated in experiments at the department. Since they are familiar with the department and the procedure they are likely to help again.

The system is based on your contribution. Whenever you conduct an experiment please add new participants you might have and update information for the existing participants. The Participant Database consists out of three sections:

The participant section stores the contact information:

The researchers section stores information about the experimenter:

The experiment section stores information about each experiment:

In all sections a variety of functions are available to you, such as searching the database or editing the information. If you have any problems then contact the Participant Database coordinator.

Instructions

You can access the system through a web based interface following these steps:

contact the database coordinator to obtain an account

direct your browser to the Participant Database

if you use the system for the first time, browse to the researacher section and add your contact information

if you want to conduct a new experiment, browse to the experiment section and add the experiment information. If you completed step 3, then your name will appear in the researcher pull-down menu

if you add a new participant, choose “new record” on the left and enter the information.

if you use an existing participant, then add a line in the “experiments” block. Simply click at the beginning of an empty line and a pull down menu will show you all existing experiments.

Guidelines

Add new people to the database that agreed to it.

When inviting these people, make sure that you refer to the previous experiments, so that they know how you received their contact information.

Always offer the participants that you would remove them from the database if they want to. Remove them if requested.

Inform the participants that their data is only available to TU/e and that it will not be given to anybody else. They will only receive invitations to scientific experiments.

Do not give the addresses to any third party and only use it to do scientific experiments.